Jewish physicians make mark on Manitoba: Jewish Heritage Month

Jewish physicians have made an enormous contribution to the health and well-being of Manitobans.

It goes back to 1881, when Dr. Hiram Vineberg became the first Jewish physician to practice in the province. Born in Russia and raised in Ontario, he worked in Portage la Prairie for three years and was the only Jewish person in town. His practice grew to be the largest of Portage la Prairie’s four doctors.

Vineberg laid the groundwork for the province’s more than 400 Jewish physicians to follow.

Their history and contributions are recounted in the book Healing Lives: A Century of Manitoba Jewish Physicians by UM alum and accomplished author Eva Wiseman. Published in 2019 by the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada, the book is the product of several years of research and fundraising by a committee from the Jewish community.

A  UM website was established through UM Libraries so that anyone with information or archival material could submit it.

Wiseman writes that the first Jewish physician didn’t settle in Winnipeg until 1906, when Dr. Oscar Margolese set up practice at the Northeast corner of Logan and Main Street. During the first decade of the 20th century, several young Jewish Russians immigrated to the city and trained at the Manitoba Medical College, now the Max Rady College of Medicine.

“In the first half of the 20th century, and even later, Jewish physicians had to overcome prejudice,” says Dr. Jo Swartz, an anesthetist and UM faculty member who was active on the book committee and whose father, Dr. Mel Swartz, was a well-known urologist.

“They were so dedicated,” Swartz says. “They persisted and they excelled. They treated their patients with compassion.  And many of them explored the edges of science and medicine.”

Dr. Arnold Naimark, who was named the first Jewish dean of medicine at the UM in 1971 and went on to become university president, also served on the book committee. It was important, Naimark says, that the publication be more than a who’s who.

“It’s not only about who these physicians were, but what they contributed, and how that played out in a social, political and economic context,” Naimark says.

The book recounts how, from the 1880s through at least the first half of the 20th century, Manitoba Jews faced overt discrimination. They were excluded from many careers, but medicine was open to them. Although many encountered obstacles in obtaining internships and hospital appointments, practising medicine fit with the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world.”

By the 1920s, Jews were well represented as students at the UM medical college. Then, in the early 1930s under a bigoted dean of medicine, the college introduced a covert quota system to exclude many Jewish and other minority students. 

In 1943-44, a UM mathematics lecturer named Shlomo Mitchell led a small group of Jewish students in gathering evidence of the quota system. Mitchell’s whistle-blowing cost him his job. But he and his group succeeded in ending the quota by exposing it to the Manitoba government.

Today, as Wiseman notes, the once-discriminatory college is named the Max Rady College of Medicine in honour of a Jewish physician. Rady graduated with his MD from UM in 1921 and was known – like many Jewish doctors of the pre-medicare era – for treating patients regardless of their ability to pay.

The social conscience of the Jewish medical community is a strong theme in Healing Lives, from the founding of the free Mount Carmel Clinic – which some dreamed would become a Jewish hospital – to a groundbreaking health-care scheme introduced in the late 1940s.

Under this plan, Winnipeg garment factory owners paid into a health fund. Garment workers also contributed a small percentage of their wages. The Mall Medical Clinic, which had been founded in a socialist spirit by predominantly Jewish doctors, was then paid by the fund to provide health services to the workers and their families.

It was, Wiseman writes, “the first union-industry prepaid medical plan in Canada, and perhaps in all of North America.”

Healing Lives profiles trailblazers such as Dr. Jack Hildes, the hero of Winnipeg’s 1953 polio epidemic and founder of UM’s Northern Medical Unit; Dr. Lyonel Israels, a hematologist who was the patriarch of cancer care in Manitoba; and Dr. Mindel Cherniack Sheps, one of the few Jewish women admitted to the medical school under the quota. Sheps, a public health expert, moved to Saskatchewan to advise the government on introducing medicare.

Other notable figures include, to name only a few, palliative care innovator Dr. Harvey Max Chochinov, renowned geneticist Dr. Cheryl Rockman-Greenberg, inflammatory bowel disease specialist Dr. Charles Bernstein and children’s health champion Dr. Dorothy (Osovsky) Hollenberg, a member by marriage of Winnipeg’s Hollenberg medical dynasty.

“Jewish physicians have taken their place in every aspect of the medical profession,” says Naimark.

Rady Communications Staff